Antoni Strzalka, 77, Labor Camp Survivor

August 14, 2000|By Evan Osnos, Tribune Staff Writer.

Antoni Strzalka was 16 when German troops took him from his family's home in Wolbrom, Poland, and placed him in the first of a string of labor camps he would inhabit for the five remaining years of World War II.

Decades later, even after settling in Chicago, raising a family and retiring after nearly 40 years as a steel worker, Mr. Strzalka never seemed to have recovered from those trials, his family said, and remained haunted by his wartime experience.

"It affected his whole life. I could never understand what he went through except that I saw the effects in him," said his daughter, Diana. "He was a very strong man but a very hard man. It poisoned him."

Mr. Strzalka, 77, who lived in Riverdale since 1977, died Monday, Aug. 7, at St. Francis Hospital in Blue Island after a long battle with heart disease and cancer.

To many who knew him in the city's Polish neighborhoods, Mr. Strzalka was a cryptic and often difficult man who collected pens, matchbooks and sugar packets as if he never knew when the supply would run out, said his daughter, a Tribune staff writer.

"He would take anything that's free: sugar packets, church bulletins. His house is filled with thousands and thousands of them," she said. "He would just walk along, his head down, scanning."

After being liberated by Allied forces, Mr. Strzalka worked for several years in a camp for displaced persons before leaving Europe.

Mr. Strzalka, one of five children, lost touch with his family in Poland after the war. It was not until last month that a trip to Poland by a relative produced a tearful phone call between Mr. Strzalka and his one surviving brother, Zygmunt, also a labor camp survivor.

When he came to America, Mr. Strzalka settled in the Roseland community. There he met his wife, Lottie, who helped him learn English.

The two started a family and he took a post with Acme Steel in Riverdale, where he would work for 37 years.

Throughout that time and into his retirement, Mr. Strzalka supported and cared for his wife who suffered from mental illness.

"There's something very honorable in that," his daughter said.

In addition to his wife, daughter and brother, Mr. Strzalka is survived by another daughter, Bernadette, and five grandchildren.